Faculty at Cornell have combined detector-building experience with electron microscopy expertise to develop the Electron Microscope Pixel Array Detector, or EMPAD. Partnering with a leading scientific instrument manufacturer, this technology is now available as an option on new electron microscopes from Thermo Fisher Scientific.
EMPAD detector technology is essentially a camera, with another camera at every pixel. This allows an EMPAD user to deduce the path of every electron going through a material. This immediately improves microscope resolution, already leading to a 2018 Guinness World Record for best microscope resolution. More importantly, the Cornell team has recently shown that properties like strain and magnetic fields in materials can imaged using the EMPAD.